We Are in Love With the New She-Ra Design (And the Awful Men Hating on It Is Just a Bonus)

Over the weekend, the first images from Netflix & Dreamwork’s upcoming She-Ra reboot showed up online. Noelle Stevenson, the Eisner-winning creator of Lumberjanes and Nimona, will be serving as showrunner and executive producer, and we’ve been anxiously waiting to see what her take on the beloved 80s character would look like. We are not disappointed.

The images were released in EW, and we’ve also gotten permission to post them here. Not only does She-Ra look amazing, but the other “Princesses of Power” look totally badass.

There’s so much to be excited about. The original She-Ra told the story of Princess Adora, the long-lost twin sister of Prince Adam (aka He-Man). She’s able to transform into She-Ra via the Sword of Protection, the parallel to her brother’s Sword of Power. The show was an over-the-top 80s joy, and Stevenson is such a fantastic choice to bring us a more modern but equally fantastic version. The new animation style totally reflects that. It’s so cool to see a more realistic-looking She-Ra, with muscled arms and a more practical (but still gorgeous) outfit. Plus, in the original, Adam and Adora were 16-year-old children. I’m not sure if that will be true of the reboot, but it’s nice to see a youthful, playful-looking She-Ra.

Not everyone is happy about the new design, of course. A whole bunch of grown-ass dudes have felt the need to let us all know this new She-Ra–a character from an animated children’s show–doesn’t sufficiently impress them and their potential boners. I don’t even want to give these weirdos the attention of embedding their tweets, but boy, they are super mad that She-Ra no longer lives up to the scale of hotness they demand from what is, again, a show for children.

At its core, this anger over a lack of conventional hotness isn’t really about the character. It’s about these men not being able to handle anything, including a show that is and always has been primarily aimed at young girls, that doesn’t take their desires into account before all else. This demand to have an ownership over She-Ra’s appearance is a bit of an extreme (though not unusual) example, but it does shine a light on just how pervasive this notion is. There are far too many men who are genuinely angered by the existence of anything that treats them not even with disdain, but with indifference. Even things that are for women or girls must first and foremost appease men or risk angering or alienating them.

(image: Filmation Associates / Mattel)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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